What’s this new type of Parajumbles I see…

As if Parajumbles of the regular variety weren’t mystifying enough – ever since CAT 2011 there has been a new type that has some of us a little dazed. Seen regularly in singlets in CAT ’11, you will find at least 1-2 in CAT this year. Don’t get caught unawares, treat them like your regular Para Jumbles, here are a few that you can practise right away.

Directions for questions 1 to 10: In each of the questions given below, four sentences are given labeled a, b, c and d. Of these, three statements need to be arranged in a logical order to form a coherent paragraph/passage. From the given options, choose the option that does not fit the sequence.

1. a. Picking up where The Hands of History left off, Simon Hoggart’s brilliant new collection of parliamentary sketches takes us from the dying days of Tony Blair’s leadership, through the shadow-filled days of Gordon Brown and on to the utterly bewildering days of that comedy double-act Cameron and Clegg.
b. He is a striking representative of a great British tradition, of something we do well, and where he stands with his own heroes, George Cruikshank and Thomas Rowlandson.
c. Above all, he gives us incisive and witty pen-portraits of those responsible for our plight: the belligerent Brown, the unintelligible Prescott, the slippery Cameron and the bemused Miliband.
d. He charts the events that made the news, the faux-pas that should have, and the myriad mistakes that have landed us all where we are now.

2. a. Taking his own ignorance as a given, his style of dogged questioning of every certainty and his huge influence over the youths of Athens led to his trial, his defiant comment that “the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being”, and ultimately to his execution by hemlock.
b. Socrates established a method of probing into the eternal questions of existence and morality by relentless inquiry and debate.
c. His demeanour is gentle and slow, but his endless questioning of moral norms puts him in direct conflict with authority.
d. Socrates is never mentioned in this book and it’s not necessary to know anything about him, but the parallels are obvious.

3. a. For this was Dickens with the laughter taken out.
b. That Great Expectations achieves its seriousness of purpose by sometimes comic means, that the language bursts with life, that its gusto leaves you breathless and its shame makes the pages curl, that you are implicated in every act of physical and emotional cruelty to the point where you don’t know who’s the more guilty, you or Pip, you or Orlick, you or Magwitch, goes without saying if you are a reader of Dickens.
c. But you would never have guessed any of these things from the BBC’s adaptation.
d. We must guess that the BBC is embarrassed by the eccentricity of the writing, the hyperbole of the characterization, the wild marginalia, the lunatic flights of fancy?

4. a. For me paper wealth and tangible wealth amount to the same thing.
b. If I get more money, I have more wealth because I can spend the money for other things — real things.
c. But if we all get more money overnight, as in a shower of money from helicopters, only our paper wealth increases; our collective tangible wealth doesn’t change because there aren’t more things to buy with the additional money.
d. If it did, the government could cure poverty and increase nation’s wealth simply by printing more money.

5. a. More specifically, it is human beings alone who (a) operate in their everyday activities with an understanding of Being and (b) are able to reflect upon what it means to be.
b. But to think of Being in this way would be to commit the very mistake that the capitalization is supposed to help us avoid.
c. If we look around at beings in general-from particles to planets, ants to apes-it is human beings alone who are able to encounter the question of what it means to be.
d. This gives us a way of understanding statements such as “Dasein is ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it.”

6. a. Often, those who settled abroad were classified as selfish and self-serving, betraying the homeland.
b. Even in the West, all that we seem to be aware of, and revel in, are the Indians who have made good, not the many more working at low-end jobs or in the shadowy grey market.
c. Now, not only are they more valued but it is their intellectual labour which defines research fashion and priorities.
d. Be it literature or films, social science theorizing or managerial/entrepreneurial models – experience abroad is valorized and sought to be transplanted back home.

7. a. At other times it is the repetitiveness more than the variability of the names that makes them seem less than distinctive, an impression sometimes heightened by their transparent meaning.
b. The heroines of two different myths may have the same name, while the heroine in two versions of the same myth will have a different name.
c. This apparent contradiction reflects the two poles of the heroine’s situation: to be little more than a name in a genealogy, or to be distinct, to suffer, sometimes even to achieve immortality.
d. On the other hand, a few of the most familiar figures have names that are significant and distinctive.

8. a. Doing research is essentially like solving a puzzle.
b. Puzzles have rules and predetermined solutions
c. Research involves extrapolating knowledge to newer territories and unforeseen challenges.
d. A striking feature of doing research is that the aim is to discover what is known in advance.

9. a. As far as we know, death is a great emptiness for us-a threshold beyond which we can directly perceive nothing.
b. Such a threshold is inseparable from the sacred, which aids us in our struggles to reconcile our inherent limitedness with our convictions.
c. Nevertheless, that which is beyond the threshold of death is unavailable to us in any direct or unmediated fashion.
d. Granted, we readily project our fantasies into, and live out of faiths in relation to this void.

10. a. Our culture is full of assumptions and stereotypes about how the mind works, perhaps none so enduring as the legend of the “tortured artist”.
b. However, while the final verdict is still out on the issue, both the folk and the scientific evidence provide tantalizing clues that this legend may be fact.
c. The image is durable, but science has not yet been able to conclusively verify or disprove it.
d. Science stamps natural phenomena with a systemic form, and its theories with a natural
inevitability.

Answers and Explanations

1. b The paragraph presents a review of a book by Simon Hoggart about the political culture and politicians. The tone of the author is critical and scathing (as evident by the words dying days, shadow-filled days, utterly bewildering days, faux-pas, mistakes etc) and the book talks about the political reasons of our plight and the mistakes of the big politicians. Sentence (b) fails to match with the theme and the idea and stands out as heroes and tradition represent positive ideas that are contradictory to the rest of the sentences. (a), (d), (c) is the correct sequence and option (b) is the correct choice.

2. c (b) is the opening sentence as it states the method employed by Socrates. (a) summarizes the consequences of the method in terms of his increased influence over the youth as well as his execution because of those methods. (d) states that the book (in question) never mentions Socrates directly but the parallelism between the protagonist (of the book) and Socrates is obvious. The paragraph is actually from a book review and the first lines form the background. The later lines that will follow will try to explain this parallelism by bringing out the character sketch of the protagonist. (c) does not match with these lines because of the tense inconsistency between it and the other lines. (a), (b) and (d) are in the past tense whereas (c) is in present tense. Moreover (c) is a repetition of the idea already mentioned in (a). Thus, (c) is the correct choice.

3. d The paragraph talks about the BBC’s adaptation of Great Expectations. The author appreciates Great Expectations but criticizes the BBC’s adaptation. (b) introduces the subject. It elaborates the virtues of Great Expectations. C introduces a contrast by presenting a comparison of the book with its BBC’s adaptation. So, BC is a pair. (a) states the shortcoming of the adaptation. Thus, (c) presents a statement and (a) presents the reason behind it making (c) & (a) a mandatory pair. (d) talks about guessing but cannot come after (c) because first person personal pronoun “we” cannot come immediately after a second person personal pronoun “you”. Hence, option (d) is the correct choice.

4. d The author is talking about money and its true value. He discusses two cases; first when increase in money means increase in wealth and second when increase in money does not mean anything. The idea implied by the author’s statements is that money loses its value if it increases without a comparable increase in real output. Thus, (b), (a) & (c) form a sequence. (b) introduces the idea of the author i.e. what happens when he gets more money. (a) is an add on as the author wants to explain what all is considered as money. (c) talks about the second scenario when everybody gets money (becomes rich). (d) is not linked to all these lines. A link is missing. The link should be that increase in money does not increase the wealth of the nation i.e. money does not represent the wealth of the nation. Thus the ‘it’ in (d) does not have an antecedent. Hence, (d) is the correct choice.

5. b Option (c) introduces the concept of Being and states that it is human beings alone who can associate themselves with the question of what it means to be. Option (a) further elaborates the same. ‘More specifically’ in (a) hints at the specific detail of what is mentioned in (c). So, (c) and (a) form a mandatory pair. ‘This’ in option (d) refers to the concept of Being which has been explained in the mandatory pair. Thus (c), (a) and (d) form a passage. Option (b) seems to follow the sequence, but is logically incorrect because it talks about capitalization which has not been introduced in the previous lines. Nothing has been mentioned about the theory of capitalization that can help in understanding that why it is incorrect to think of Being in this way. It is logically incorrect to talk about the concept that a theory discards before introducing the theory itself.

6. b Options (a) and (c) form a mandatory pair. (a) talks about a situation in the past and (c) compares the situation to the present scenario. ‘They’ in (c) refers to ‘people who settled abroad’ in (a). Option (d) further supports (c) by citing examples of various fields which value international concepts and theories. Hence, (a), (c) and (d) form a coherent paragraph. Option (b) talks about a different point of view. It states that we are only aware of Indians who are doing well in foreign countries and not the ones engaged in low end jobs. This statement doe not follow the logical order. Hence, the answer is (b).

7. a Options (b) and (d) entail the points of ‘contradiction’ mentioned in option (c). Thus (b), (d) and (c) form a logical sequence. Option (a) begins with ‘At other times’, but none of the other options begins with ‘At times’. So there is no scope of comparison. In addition, (a) talks about variability of the names which has not been talked about in any of the options. Option (d) only states that the names are distinctive. For (a) to follow, there should be a line in the jumble which states that variability of the names make them less distinctive. Hence, option (a) does not follow.

8. c The sentence in option (c) does not fit the sequence (d-a-c) formed by the rest of the sentences. (d) talks about how in research the aim “is to discover what is known in advance.” (a) and (b) follow (d) by comparing this aspect of research with solving a puzzle. (c) is not in line with the rest as it talks about research as an extrapolation and is not in sync with the characterization of research as essentially a process of discovering what is known in advance.

9. b The sentence in option (b) is not in keeping with the rest which describe death as a great void which we cannot directly perceive (though we try to “live out of faiths in relation to this void”). Sentence (b) talks vaguely about our inherent limitedness without connecting such “limitedness” with death or mortality.

10. d The sentence in option (d) does not contribute to the discussion on the “tortured artist” and how far this characterization is justified.

Sowmya, I am not sure if I have understood your query and hence the response may not be appropriate.
The choices in each of these can be the four statements (a or b or c or d) because only one of these four statement is out of context wrt the other three. For example in Q1 statement b is the answer. If you are unable to understand the reason then please refer to the explanations given after the answer key.

Sir my NMAT is on coming sunday. Till now i have taken all the FLT’s and mock nmat. %ile are mock-87, flt-1 87 , flt-2 94 and flt-3 82. Sir the overall cut off is quite different from the actual 70 (probably coz of the difficulty level) because of which m not able to get a clear picture. I have few doubts:

1. Are these tests sufficient enough?
2. What all is to be done fr nmat?
3. Is d Difficulty level same?
4. Is my performance good enough to get a score of 225+

All these days was waiting for ur blog on NMAT but since u might be occupied with work so asked all these doubts. I asked a doubt few days back but didn’t get any reply.Hope u reply to dis asap as i m left with couple of days to formualte a final strategy.

Rocky, apologies for missing your earlier query.
The target score in NMAT should be 215 (EU 60, Rsg 70 and QA 80) since for the last couple of years the cut off has been in the range of 210 with the cutoffs as EU 55, Rsg 65 and QA 76.
In English your focus should be on Vocabulary and Sentence correction since this comprises almost 60% of the section. In QA the focus has to be on DI and Arithmetic while in Reasoning you should focus on Mathematical Reasoning and Deductive Logic. Critical Reasoning is usually not easy.
The tests that you have taken are sufficient for your preparation and with with these scores it should not be difficult to get the desired score in NMAT.
Do check out the “Strategy After CAT” section in http://www.careerlauncher.com/cat2013 for an analysis of NMAT’13.

Read your reviews there were question on what question will you ask the author . Can you please throw some light on that as in what are the strategy and theory to do well in these question . I could not find one link where i could find how to find solution to such question .

Ravi, these questions are a combination of Para Completion and inferential questions. The author should be asked something that is not explicitly mentioned in the passage and needs to be inferred. It should obviously be connected to the passage and the 4 Rules to Master Para Completion can be used to eliinate options.

Dea sir,
Geometry e-fundabook discussions are taken by
Some other faculty from Cl . Is it please possible if you
Can take rest of the e-fundabook discussion.? They
SQC techinques used by you can be best explained by you only
In geo ques. Pleaseee sir

Question 1 : When will there be another webinar or a blog post on CAT 2013 analysis?

Question 2: Seeing the fluctuations in the difficulty level of each subsection( EU,LR,RC,DI) , is it still possible for one to strategise the attempts in the subsections or way of attempting the paper beforehand to any extent , howsoever small . If yes , please tell what should be the strategy?

Question 3: What are type of LRs that are being reported . Are they using unique LR types also – like lock and key combination,lock lever grid, etc ( which have their own unique method for solving?). Is the mathematical reasoning LR constant across all the slots or otherwise ?. If yes , what is its difficulty level with respect to the proc mocks.

Question 4:- Initially I came to know that the RCs were easier than CL mocks, are they now difficult than mock or of the same level ? .

My CAT is on 6th of November. Should I revise RC passages & its questions also and try to understand what is being discussed in the passage . In this way I will have familiarity with (1)many of the topics that RC generally cover and the complex sentence structures that is used in the RCs (2)with the traps that I have been falling into . Please help me strategise this aspect of my preparation.

a)He said he understood his people’s concerns but he blamed the unrest on miscreants and agitators, declaring that protests had grown so loud only because he himself had magnanimously granted rights to free expression.
b) Egyptian society ripened for a sudden outburst because he failed to improve the lot of Egypt’s poorest very much, throttled meaningful political evolution and let his police humiliate victims with impunity.
c)While it is true that during his rule Egyptians spoke more freely it was not because Mr Mubarak’s regime had allowed the airing of more critical views but because new technologies made it impossible for the state to retain the information monopoly it once enjoyed.
d)Mr Mubarak has been slow to respond throughout the crisis, but his few appearances have been cleverly pitched. When he finally spoke, after midnight on January 28th, a day when hundreds of thousands across the breadth of Egypt had battled furiously with his police, it was with a husky voice and the petulance of a master betrayed by bungling servants.

Sir,
Could you let me know as to where it is possible to find a complete, clear and concise list of all commonly asked phrasal verbs? I tried to find them with google, but was dissapointed with the results. Is it any use studying these 2-3 days before actual CAT? my accuracy in these is around 60-70%.

Sir,
How to go about the following RC question which is seen in almost all the RC questions in cat papers..
Q) What Should you discuss with the author regarding the passage when you will meet him or what will you suggest him regarding this passage?
Q)sir what is the basic difference between Tone of the passage and style of the passage?

This new type of question is essentially the same as “What will the author go on to discuss next in the passage?” It’s a further-application type question. Try to understand the logic of the passage and decide what will be discussed next. Read the last paragraph of the passage especially carefully for clues.

Tone is more related to the tone the author assumes in the passage (is he/she being cynical? or biased? or facetious?) while style talks more about the structure of the passage. For example the style more than the tone of the passage can be “comparative.” In the end however these terms are often interchangeable.

Dipshikha, I am sure you have the conventional solutions so let me give you my way of solving the questions.

Q1. This is an infinite series and the 5th and the subsequent terms are negligible so we will ignore them and get the answer on the basis of the first 3 terms as suggested in the SQC session. 1+4/7+9/49 +16/343 = 1 + 0.57 + 0.2 + 0.04 = 1.81, Now let us check the choices
a) 27/14 = 2 – 1/14 = 1.93 very bighence incorrect
b) 21/13 = 1 + 8/13 < 1.8 incorrect
c) 49/27 = 2 - 5/27 > and approximately = 1.8, could be correct
d) 256/147 = 1 + 103/147 = 1.7 hence incorrect.
Correct answer Choice (c)

Q2. The digit sum of the number is 2 thus it can have either two 1’s and 0’s or one 2 and rest 0’s. Let us again use SQC and check for smaller numbers:
Between 1 and 10 the possible only number is 2
Between 10 and 100 the possible numbers are 11 and 20
Between 100 and 1000 the possible numbers are 101, 110, 200
or the number of cases is equal to the power of 10 on the right hand side limit, thus the answer is 11

sir i’v my cat in the next 6 days… as told by you in the webinar am practising CAT 03-08 for QA and 90-98 for DI and also rc from 95-98.and also practising mocks 1-4! Is that enough?? also i need your SQC technique to solve these two questions that i encountered

1) the infinite sum of 1+4/7+9/7^2 +16/7^3 +25/7^4

2)suppose n is an integer such that the sum of the digits of n is 2 and 10^10<n<10^11.Then the number of different values of n is

Sir, Could you please also advise how to tackle RC question like “what would you like to ask the author?”.
What kinds of details we should look for in RC to eliminate the wrong options and boil down the correct the ans.

This is important.Could you please advise how to handle the RC que like “what you would like to ask the author”?
What kind of details in the passage we should look to eliminate the wrong options and boil down to the correct ans.

Great article Sir. I’d like to discuss a question:
Q4. I think the answer should be option A.
The ‘it’ in D refers to the ‘tangible wealth’ in C, also A and C are in contradiction with each other. Correct sequence, I think, is BCD.

The correct sequence should be – “If I get more money, I have more wealth because I can spend the money for other things — real things. For me paper wealth and tangible wealth amount to the same thing. But if we all get more money overnight, as in a shower of money from helicopters, only our paper wealth increases; our collective tangible wealth doesn’t change because there aren’t more things to buy with the additional money.”

The word “it” in statement (d) cannot find a correct antecedent in any of the statements because – with statement (c), the argument looks incomplete. For the government be able to solve the problem of poverty by simply printing more money, there should be more things available to buy ( as given in (c)… for this, statement (d) should have been “ if there were , then the government could cure poverty and increase nation’s wealth simply by printing more money.”

Sir, u ROCK!! Just like all your other posts, this too was invaluable. Doing these 10 questions helped boost my confidence in solving these type of questions.
Sir, can u give the correct order in which the correct-three would be arranged in Q9 & Q.10.

Sir, You ROCK!! Just like all your other posts, this too was invaluable. Doing these 10 questions helped boost my confidence in solving these type of questions.
Sir, can u give the correct order in which the correct-three would be arranged in Q9 & Q.10.

Q9. The correct sequence should be – “As far as we know, death is a great emptiness for us—a threshold beyond which we can directly perceive nothing. Granted, we readily project our fantasies into, and live out of faiths in relation to this void. Nevertheless, that which is beyond the threshold of death is unavailable to us in any direct or unmediated fashion.”

The ‘void’ described in statement (d) refers to the area beyond the threshold where we perceive nothing (as given in statement (a)). There is no reference / connect to the ‘limitedness’ as stated in statement (b). The odd sentence is (b).

Q10. – The correct sequence should be – “Our culture is full of assumptions and stereotypes about how the mind works, perhaps none so enduring as the legend of the “tortured art¬ist”. The image is durable, but sci¬ence has not yet been able to conclu¬sively verify or disprove it. How¬ever, while the final verdict is still out on the issue, both the folk and the scientific evidence provide tan-talizing clues that this legend may be fact.”

All the three statements except (d) talk about the legend of the “tortured artist “; his characterization; his veracity.

Sir, thanks a lot for uploading these q’s. I have few doubts on q-2 : – how can we conclude it is from a book about socrates
– I felt that a,b,c are describing about the characteristic of socrates and they were told by some one person talking about socrates, so d could be the odd one.
Please correct me where I’m going wrong, thank you.

GP sir,
Can you post a similar kind of collection for paracompletion questions along with solutions as i was having difficulty in applying the concepts you had mentioned earlier in the blog and can’t afford to leave 3 questions.Any kind of help in this regard would be appreciated.

The answer to question number 4 is incorrect, because the fourth statement (d) does have an antecedent i.e (c), where the author talks about throwing tangible money at the citizens. What is logically incorrect is the first statement, where the author says that he thinks “For me paper wealth and tangible wealth amount to the same thing”. Because in the statement (c), he says that increase in paper wealth doesn’t increase our ‘collective tangible wealth’. Therefore, the first sentence is logical not consistent with the author’s inference. What do you think?

Q4. The correct sequence should be – “If I get more money, I have more wealth because I can spend the money for other things — real things. For me paper wealth and tangible wealth amount to the same thing. But if we all get more money overnight, as in a shower of money from helicopters, only our paper wealth increases; our collective tangible wealth doesn’t change because there aren’t more things to buy with the additional money.”

The word “it” in statement (d) cannot find a correct antecedent in any of the statements because – with statement (c), the argument looks incomplete. For the government be able to solve the problem of poverty by simply printing more money, there should be more things available to buy ( as given in (c)… for this, statement (d) should have been “ if there were , then the government could cure poverty and increase nation’s wealth simply by printing more money.”

Really sry posted at the wrong place earlier:-
Sir in ques.4 can’t the “collective tangible wealth” stated in (c) be the antecedent for the ‘it’ mentioned in (d) and hence (b) (c) (d) be the correct sequence of statements?

The level of difficulty of these questions is similar to CAT. For solving these questions, you need to find links between sentences and look for a sentence that cannot form a mandatory pair with any other sentence.

Q2. The correct sequence should be – “Socrates established a method of probing into the eternal questions of existence and morality by relentless inquiry and debate. Taking his own ignorance as a given, his style of dogged questioning of every certainty and his huge influence over the youths of Athens led to his trial, his defiant comment that “the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being”, and ultimately to his execution by hemlock. Socrates is never mentioned in this book and it’s not necessary to know anything about him, but the parallels are obvious.”

Statements (a) and (b) appear to be part of the same description.Theya re also both in the past tense. (c) does not match with these statements because of the tense inconsistency.Statement (c) also does not fit with (d). In statement (d) a parallel between Socrates and someone else in a book is described. (c) cannot immediately follow this sentence.

I would like to thank you sir for this kind effort.
I have doubt in the explanation given for Q 9…sir, (a) talks about a threshold n da same idea is carried forward in option (b)…but the out of context sentence is option (b)??? couldn’t follow you sir…plz enlighten.

Q9. The correct sequence should be – “As far as we know, death is a great emptiness for us—a threshold beyond which we can directly perceive nothing. Granted, we readily project our fantasies into, and live out of faiths in relation to this void. Nevertheless, that which is beyond the threshold of death is unavailable to us in any direct or unmediated fashion.”

The ‘void’ described in statement (d) refers to the area beyond the threshold where we perceive nothing (as given in statement (a)). There is no reference / connect to the ‘limitedness’ as stated in statement (b). The odd sentence is (b).

Thank you Sir. You Rock !! This post,, just like all your other posts is invaluable. Doing these 10 Parajumbles of the new type surely did boost my confidence. Sir, Can u post more explanation for, or the correct sequence that Q.9 & Q.10 would have.

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About GP

Gautam Puri

GP describes his academic performance early in life as pathetic. With scores of 61% in Xth and 65% in XIIth, he was always at the bottom of the class. For students, he is an aptitude guru who simplifies fundamentals, problem solving, and test taking strategy. GP loves driving & has been part of Raid-de- Himalayas off road adventure. An IIM B alumnus, GP is one of the core founders of CL.